Introduction

Fluid Construction Grammar grew out of a larger body of research studying the origins and evolution of language. In earlier work, it has already been shown how large populations of autonomous agents can develop shared lexicons and ontologies (Steels, 2001). FCG is part of attempts to carry this research into the domain of grammar. More specifically, how the grounding of experiments in the real world plays a role in grammar construction and what kind of grammatical framework would be most suited for this purpose.

A very promising direction has been taken under the influence of Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995) and its associated learning framework, Constructivist Learning (Tomasello, 2003). Many of the principles underlying these theories have been implemented in FCG by building on existing techniques from computational linguistics (such as unification and typed feature structures) and using them in a novel way. In the following two subsections, we will explain how FCG relates to other construction grammars and describe additional principles underlying the formalism.

Fluid Construction Grammar was designed about 2001 by Luc Steels for doing research on the origins and evolution of language. Since then, a lot of researchers have been involved in developing and improving the formalism. Early work was done by Nicolas Neubauer, and especially Joachim De Beule has improved the core engine of the system. Martin Loetzsch has been a driving force in making a more user-friendly software package of FCG. At present, two teams of researchers at the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Brussels and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris are further developing the formalism and doing experiments on different kinds of language universals. The people working in Brussels are Joachim De Beule, Joris Bleys and Pieter Wellens. The people in Paris are Martin Loetzsch, Wouter Van den Broeck and Remi van Trijp. Luc Steels is director of both of the laboratories and strongly involved in all the current and upcoming projects. The research on FCG is funded by the two labs, with additional funding by the ECAgents Project, sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies Program of the European Community (IST-1940).

Babel2 source code

Babel2 is an experimental Common Lisp implementation of FCG among other things. It can be downloaded here [March 2008 release].